Tag: politics

Government backdown won’t apply to all but is an opening

The Work Capability Assessment (WCA) is highly damaging to those of us who have to go through it. Despite this, both main parties have consistently denied that there is any problem, and claimed that the WCA is necessary to weed out scroungers. That might be about to change.

Firstly, Labour announced at their conference that they would scrap the WCA altogether. This doesn’t mean much right now since they are not in power, but it is a major turnaround for a party that introduced the WCA in the first place and has refused to even oppose most benefit cuts in the last few years. Jeremy Corbyn called the WCA degrading. Debbie Abrahams acknowledged that it makes people feel worthless and dehumanised.

It’s not all good, since they still refuse to oppose benefit sanctions, and used the same old language about work being the goal for everyone, but it is a start.

“If someone has a disease which can only get worse then it doesn’t make sense to ask them to turn up for repeated appointments. If their condition is not going to improve, it is not right to ask them to be tested time after time. So we will stop it.”

This is a huge reversal of policy. Continuous retesting was always the point of Employment Support Allowance (ESA) although there have never been enough resources to apply that to everyone.

Many people are celebrating this. However, there are big questions as the government haven’t specified any details. I’m not sure they even know yet. Reports imply that the exemption from retesting will apply to people with specific illnesses that are known to only deteriorate. If that is the case, then many people who have illnesses that are just as bad as those on the list but are not recognised as such, will miss out. So will people who have not yet been diagnosed, and that can mean people who are sick for years – or decades – before they find out the cause.

The more logical policy would be to apply this exemption to everyone who is in the Support Group, since this category is meant to contain people who have no prospect of improvement. In practice the Support Group doesn’t work like that, and people who will never improve are frequently placed in the Work Related Activity Group instead, thanks to DWP efforts to deny them support in order to keep costs down. If the exemption were to apply to the Support Group only then it would still be unfair to all those improperly placed in the WRAG.

Whether the Government decides who qualifies based on diagnosis, or based on support group, it will still be unfair. However, I do see this announcement as a big win. A Tory government minister said “constant reassessment is pointless” and “does increase their stress and anxiety levels” “causes financial insecurity” to describe repeated work capability assessments. That is a huge admission for the Tories, or even for Labour.

We can use this. We can attack the inconsistencies in the government’s argument. We can point out that the Work Capability Assessment is damaging to everyone. We can show that their descriptions apply to Personal Independence Payments too, even though they’ve spent six years attacking PIP’s predecessor, DLA as “abandoning” people so as to justify welfare reform and repeated reassessments. This isn’t an unqualified victory and won’t necessarily improve things for that many people (perhaps including myself) but this is a major event in the struggle against welfare cuts of the last few years.

The All About Trans project looks at creative ways to encourage greater understanding between trans* people and media professionals to support better, more sensitive representation in the UK media.

The project offers the trans* community a platform to speak out against the prejudice they may experience and promotes engagement between the wide diversity of trans* voices and the media.” – http://www.allabouttrans.org.uk/about/

Over the last two months one of the people who works with All About Trans and has a reasonable media profile has been making comedy videos where he plays a woman in an ill-fitting wig with facial hair. He has ignored criticism that it mocks trans women regardless of his intentions. When it was pointed out to All About Trans that this made him unsuitable to represent trans people they said:

We do not and have never claimed to represent the trans community – that’s not our remit.

I understand that All About Trans sees itself as merely a link between transgender people and media. Leaving aside that this isn’t quite true – the project has been cited by name in various media outlets and in the quote above refers to offering a platform – making connections like this is not and cannot be neutral. There is discretion and choice involved.

It doesn’t matter if All About Trans want to represent trans people or not. It doesn’t matter if we want them to represent trans people or not. The fact is, to the writers and presenters, and to the general public that see what is written and broadcast, both All About Trans and the people that they select are there representing trans people.

All About Trans puts forward a certain set of people to comment in the media. That selection is a choice they have made. When one of the people they have put forward has repeatedly made comedy based on prejudice against trans women, All About Trans have promoted a transmisogynist as representing trans people. In failing to condemn the material that hurts trans women, All About Trans have tacitly condoned it.

All About Trans cannot abdicate responsibility here. They are in a position of representing trans people regardless of whether they intended to or not, and the choices they make about who to promote matter. The actions of those representatives matter. If a person’s actions work against the group they are representing, they are no longer suitable to represent that group, and continuing to put them forward is therefore a statement about their actions. All About Trans have done good work in the past but in their response to this situation they are letting us all down. If the people running All About Trans do not think that the comedy in question is a promoting misogyny and transmisogyny then they should say so, so that we at least know where we stand.

This morning we received the final judgment in our appeal of the judicial review of the consultation for PIP. The appeal was not successful.

The full text of the judgment is linked below but I will quote here the key paragraphs that my solicitor pointed out.

Once it was accepted, as it had to be on the evidence, that the Respondent approached the 2013 consultation with an open mind, it seems to me that the challenge to the process as a whole must fail. It is explained in the evidence that all options were open as to the “Moving around criteria”, even if that meant changing the criteria for “Planning and following journeys” or looking for funding elsewhere. The reality was that consultees such as Mr Sumpter had every opportunity to present to the Respondent the difficulties that the move from a 50 metre benchmark to a 20 metre one would cause to them. It is clear that such opportunity was taken. In reality, it would have gone nowhere to contend in the consultation that the physically disabled should continue to be favoured at the expense of those who suffered other disabilities. No doubt none would have wished to present such an unattractive argument. Given the Respondent’s overall policy to make PIP available to a wider category of the disabled, new beneficiaries obviously had to come into the equation and there would have been no point in contending that they should be excluded.

…As I understand the law, consultation has to be fair; it does not have to be perfect. With the benefit of hindsight, it will no doubt often be possible to show that a consultation could have been carried out rather better, but that will not necessarily mean that it was unfair. That is what the judge said at paragraph 123 of his judgment and I agree with him.

I note that the judge did draw attention to the choice that the government made to frame continuing to help physically disabled people as unfairly withholding help from people with mental and cognitive difficulties. He did not, however, find it relevant that the consultation failed to admit the government decision to give new help at the expense of help previously available. The judge implied that people responding to the consultation only needed to talk about the difficulties we would face, not about the decision to take money away for use elsewhere.

This time last year we took the Department of Work and Pensions to a judicial review to decide if they properly consulted about cutting help for people who can only walk a few metres.

The original consultation did not make clear the plan to cut the qualifying maximum distance from 50 metres to 20. In quite strong language for a judge, the court noted that the consultation was “Mind-bogglingly opaque”, “At best ambivalent”, and “Convoluted, inherently unclear, ambiguous and confusing. No construction allows for full coherence.”

Nevertheless, the court found – very narrowly – in favour of the government and said that the second consultation, started after this judicial review was in motion, was enough to make things right.

This week we are back in court to appeal that decision. We argue that the second consultation could never have changed the decision that had already been made. The hearing will take place in the Royal Courts of Justice in London from 10:30 on the 14th and 15th of July. The judgement will follow a few days later.

It is frustrating that this case is about whether the consultation on PIP was fair rather than about the cut itself, but the courts cannot decide on government policy. As part of their defence the DWP pointed out that they are fully aware of the impact of their policy, and are removing DLA from “individuals with genuine health conditions and disabilities and genuine need” and “removing or reducing that benefit may affect their daily lives.” The DWP did do a consultation on their policy though, and that consultation wasn’t fair, so that is what we are fighting.

My Motability car, which I stand to lose if denied the high rate mobility component of PIP

Background information

As part of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 the government replaced Disability Allowance with Personal Independence Payments. Their main reason for the change was to introduce repeated frequent testing to see if claimants have miraculously healed. They also changed the maximum distance that you can walk and still qualify for help towards regaining your mobility. Under DLA the cutoff was recognised to be 50 metres. Under PIP it has been slashed to just 20 metres. This means that if someone can walk more than 20 but less than 50 metres (subject to a few caveats) then they will no longer get the highest amount for the mobility component of PIP. Assuming the person still qualifies for the lower rate of mobility, this is a cut of £35.65 per week. But worse than that, the higher rate mobility component is a gateway to all sorts of help including the right to lease a car or wheelchair through the Motability scheme. As a result of this cut more than a hundred people are losing their car every week, and many thousands more will follow when they are reassessed for PIP. Losing independent transport means losing independence and access to services.

It seems like forever since our attempt to get a judicial review over PIP and the fraudulent consultation. Well, that attempt has come to fruition at last. The case against the DWP will be heard in Birmingham on the 9th and 10th of July.

This specific case is about the decision to slash support from those who can walk less than fifty metres, to only those who can walk less than twenty. The drastic reduction in the eligible distance means that some 500,000 people will be left without support even though they can walk less than 50m without some kind of assistance. This change has been made purely to cut costs, as was admitted by the DWP in their response when we forced them to re-open their consultation.

It has actually been quite difficult to bring a case against an opponent that can change the rules to suit its own agenda however the court has agreed to hear arguments surrounding the consultation and the fact that the DWP did not mention the slashing of support until after the consultation was complete.

I will provide more details here on the specific arguments we will make as soon as I can clear them with my solicitor.

Ed Miliband made a speech today setting out how Labour will cut spending on Social Security. He said “Controlling social security spending and putting decent values at the heart of the system are not conflicting priorities.” Many of the ideas he set out in the speech seem positive but his language suggested that Labour still have some of the mainstream rhetoric at heart. He said that the system does need reform, and I won’t disagree with that, but I differ slightly as to how.

“So the four building blocks of a One Nation social security system are: work, rewarding work, investing for the future not paying for failure, and recognising contribution.“

For the rewarding work part, Miliband noted that work does not pay enough to live on and that welfare fills that gap, and I applaud his commitment to promote a living wage and to change the law to prevent loopholes that allow reduced wages.

When it comes to investing for the future not paying for failure he said that housing benefit costs are high because there are not enough homes and said that building homes would be a priority, although he did not say who would pay for those homes or mention a rent cap. Nevertheless I applaud the commitment to building homes.

However, I disagree with what he said about recognising contribution. He said that “people’s faith in social security has been shaken” because “it appears that some people get something for nothing and other people get nothing for something“. The example given was that someone who became unemployed after forty years would receive the same help as someone who became unemployed after two years. I think this is a very poor example given that he was talking about National Insurance, because it is that nature of an insurance system that some people pay in more than others but that everyone gets the same help when they need it. A driver who had a car accident after ten years of driving would not get a better payout than a driver who crashed in their first week. The actual issue which needs addressing here is that Job Seeker’s Allowance is not enough to live on whether a person has worked two years or forty and in fact in the UK our unemployment benefits are much lower as a proportion of income than in many other countries.

It is when Miliband turns to the subject of work that we find some of that scrounger rhetoric still present. Tell-tale phrases such as:

“Which leaves hundreds of thousands of people in long-term idleness.”

“the denial of responsibility by those who could work and don’t do so.”

“Now just as there is a minority who should be working and don’t want to, there is a majority who are desperate for work and can’t find it.“

“Idleness” is a loaded word when Miliband could have referred to unemployment. At least in the last statement he said that it is a minority that does not want to work, but I believe he should have gone further and pointed out just how tiny that minority is rather than fuel the myth. Maybe as Sue Marsh says Labour are improving when it comes to scrounger rhetoric, but they are still using the language of the Tories and the tabloid papers and they have some way to go.

Labour’s big idea to tackle unemployment is a compulsory jobs guarantee. I like the idea of a guaranteed job after a year or two of unemployment. I am not so happy with the emphasis on the compulsory part, which again plays to the scrounger rhetoric. Under Labour’s plan the government would pay for 25 hours a week at minimum wage while the employer would pay for 10 hours of training. There would be a tax on banker’s bonuses which Labour say would fully fund the scheme. I think as solutions to unemployment go, this isn’t a terrible idea, although I have to ask what happens when the funding for these jobs ends. And I am concerned that if the system is not flexible then people may be forced into inappropriate jobs which may not accommodate their circumstances or abilities. I hope that some safeguards to prevent that are written in to the compulsion.

I am more concerned about the plan for parents. Miliband said that since children of 3 and 4 years old get 15 hours a week in nursery education, parents must use that time “to undertake some preparations to help them get ready to go back to work. Attending regular interviews in the Job Centre, undertaking training, finding out what opportunities exist. To be clear, under this policy there would be no requirement to go back to work until their youngest child is 5.”

In other words, parents must spend several hours a week for two years going in to the Job Centre to attend pointless interviews which presumably will be farmed out to the likes of A4E, where they will continually re-jig their CV and attend training which may or may not be relevant to work they can get months or years later. This, apparently, is to encourage the ethic of work, because he seems to believe the scrounger rhetoric that says otherwise those parents will never want to return to work.

Disabled people got a mention in the speech too. Unfortunately Miliband reinforced his commitment to the Work Capability Assessment. He did at least concede that the WCA is not working, saying:

“But when over 40% of people win their appeals, it tells you the system isn’t working as it should. And too often people’s experience of the tests is degrading. So this test needs to change. It needs reform so that it can really distinguish between different situations. Disabled people who cannot work. Disabled people who need help to get into work. And people who can work without support.

The test should also be properly focused on helping to identify the real skills of each disabled person and the opportunities they could take up. I meet so many disabled people desperate to work but who say that the demand that they work is not accompanied by the support they need. So these tests should be connected to a Work Programme that itself is tested on its ability to get disabled people jobs that work for them.“

Miliband did not say how exactly he would change the assessment so that it can accurately distinguish between people who can or can’t work or need help, and I doubt he knows. He didn’t say how he would stop the assessment being degrading. He also made no mention at all of the severe stress caused by continuous reassessment and health implications of that.

The benefit cap, too, got Miliband’s support. He said:

“In 2011, there were 10 cases where £100,000 a year was spent on housing benefit for individual families. That’s 10 too many. And it is one of the reasons why Labour has said we would support a cap on overall benefits. As Ed Balls said on Monday, an independent body should advise government on how best to design this cap to avoid it pushing people into homelssness and costing more.”

Possibly the most stupid policy announced was an overall cap on social security spending for three years. The effort to reduce the spend on social security by attacking unemployment and high rents is great, but there is no predicting how the economy will actually do to the total cost and setting an absolute budget means that should too many people need help then some will go without or everyone will have to get less. That will result in poverty, homelessness and starvation either way.

I don’t want to criticise these ideas without providing an alternative. I want to suggest some ideas of my own which would take into account some things that I think we need to recognise: That capitalism will not focus work where we have need, such as healthcare, social care and building. That even after creating more jobs we cannot go back to full employment because new technology, efficiency savings, automation and outsourcing mean that we will never again need as many workers as we once did. That there are very few people who can work but do not want to, but there are many who want better working conditions or better wages who have a very weak bargaining position. That the benefits system is inefficient, full of errors, and places a huge strain on those subject to it.

Allowing for those facts, then, I would suggest:

Build new social housing by investing in housing associations and cap rents to create secure and cheap homes not subject to inflation through private profit.

Invest heavily in healthcare and social care to create jobs in areas where we need the services.

Introduce a Universal Basic Income (Citizen’s Income) that will provide enough to live on to every single citizen.

I think that housing associations are a much better way to invest in housing than any scheme to encourage private industry to build them. Housing associations become self-financing and take that initial investment to continue creating more homes which are cheap and secure. Rent caps would reign in private landlords who are profiteering from inflated rents, and would also prevent rents from rising in response to universal basic income. Investing in the NHS and social care would both create jobs and improve our healthcare and quality of life to the benefit of all rather than subsidising jobs within private industry for the profit of a few investors.

Universal Basic Income is, I admit, a much more distant proposition because it’s too revolutionary for many people. The concept is this: that every citizen would receive an income sufficient to live on, regardless of means, without asking anything of them in return. They would not be not required to look for work, or to volunteer for a charity, or to do community service, or anything else. It would be unconditional. It would replace the tax allowance on wages because although an employee would pay tax on all income, they would still have their universal basic income. It would replace pensions, Job Seeker’s Allowance and Employment Support Allowance (Incapacity Benefit) as well as most other benefits, in one stroke removing means testing, the work capability assessment, and the stress and stigma of the current system.

People who read my rant about The Labour Party last week will be surprised to know that yesterday I attended the Labour People’s Policy Forum in Birmingham and put questions to Labour MPs. I won’t be voting Labour any time soon but for all of the past actions and the betrayal of Labour, they are likely to be in power in 2015 and so I jumped at the chance to influence their next manifesto.

I put questions to Caroline Flint, Maria Eagle and Mary Creagh about income security and benefits. I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the answers but I was pleased when Maria Eagle told me that demonising disabled people was the worst thing that the government had done. I also asked them if they would ever consider basic income but the answer was politician-speak for “no”. (It took a few more words than that.)

In another forum Emma Round managed to get a round of applause for suggesting that Labour should apologise for ESA, the work capability assessment and Atos.

The main event of the day was a Q&A session with Ed Miliband. The audience was made up almost entirely of people who were not members of Labour, which I think was a brave decision especially since the first few questions were very angry. It opened with a demand that Labour challenge the Welfare Reform Act, calling it an insult to a developed country and an assault on its people. The second speaker gave a call to protect the NHS, saying “I work in the NHS, I believe in the NHS but next week I won’t BE in the NHS, I’ll work in public health. Come next week everything that we do and across the NHS is going to go out to tender.” These sentiments got applause and agreement from the audience. Questions followed about education, jobs, equality and much more.

Eventually I got to ask the question which had brought me there through the snow and despite the two hours of awful driving conditions and the resulting cost to my health. I asked Ed Miliband to scrap Personal Independence Payments and keep Disability Living Allowance. I’m afraid the answer was as vague and meaningless as I expected, but I am glad that I got to put the question to him in a public forum.

The government has cited one line in the guest foreward of a review of the work capability assessment as the reason why it refuses to meet with representatives of sick and disabled people. The line they objected to referred to wounded soldiers being sent back to the front by the Nazis.

As Michael Meacher MP said in Parliament “This work is evidence based, uses the DWP’s figures wherever possible, has never been challenged on accuracy.” He pointed out that it has been used by the Work and Pensions select committee, the joint committee on human rights, and in many parliamentary debates.

Mark Hoban, Minister of State for Work and Pensions, refused to meet Meacher to talk about the Work Capability Assessment and he flatly refused to meet representatives of We Are Spartacus. In Michael Meacher’s own words:

He simply replied blankly “I’m not seeing you”, and repeated it 3 0r 4 times. I kept on insisting ‘Why not?’ and finally he said “I’m not seeing Spartacus”. Again I was taken aback and asserted that in my view Spartacus had analysed hundreds of cases, prepared a very detailed and thoughtful analysis of the implications arising from these cases, and even if he disagreed strongly for whatever reasons it was his responsibility to meet them. To this he simply kept repeating “I’m not meeting Spartacus”.

Michael Meacher took it to the speaker of the house and arranged a debate to face Hoban in Parliament. Hoban didn’t turn up. Instead he send Esther McVey, Minister for Disabled People. Who publicly refused to meet disabled people. The reason given, eventually, was that it “wouldn’t be constructive”. The evidence presented was one sentence from the guest foreward of The People’s Review of the Work Capability Assessment.

The process is reminiscent of the medical tribunals that returned shell shocked and badly wounded soldiers to duty in the first world war or the ‘KV-machine’, the medical commission the Nazis used in the second world war to play down wounds so that soldiers could be reclassified ‘fit for the Eastern front’.

The government have essentially invoked Godwin’s Law to get out of meeting the most effective campaign against their welfare policy. They are afraid, desperate, and grabbing at any way out they can find.

Even if you don’t believe that it is wrong to send people to work unpaid for large profit-making companies under threat of loss of benefits, the idea that the government can change the law in the past should terrify you. Human rights law includes the idea that a person cannot be punished for something that was not illegal until after the act, although no doubt the department of work and pensions will claim that sanctions that remove benefit are not punishment despite the name “sanctions”. A government that will change the law in the past at will is a government that is out of control and has no limits on the damage that it can do.

“The Government considers that Article 6 is not engaged at all since the claim to entitlement to benefit, and any dispute regarding a benefit decision thereon which would require access to the courts, remains hypothetical.”

Strangely, despite considering article 6, the right to a fair trial, the government don’t even mention article 7, which guarantees rights against retroactive punishment. They could try to argue, as quoted above, that entitlement to benefit is hypothetical and therefore sanctions are withdrawal not punishment.

It is an affront to democracy and justice too to rush a bill through in one day so as to apply it without proper scrutiny before any appeal reaches the court and the government required to repay those who were subject to illegal sanctions.

To change the law for the future is one thing, but to try to reverse a lawful decision by the court against the government for the sake of £130 million, a drop in the ocean for welfare, looks like a childish hissy fit by the work and pensions secretary. His action undermines the rule of law and destroys what little respect people may have left for MPs.

The government rushed through the second reading, committee stage (no ammendments) and third reading in one afternoon. The final vote passed the bill by 263 to 52. Labour’s official policy was to abstain, although about forty Labour MPs voted against it. There were some very impassioned speeches in particular from Iain Lavery and John McDonnell who even recommended looking at the Boycott Workfare website.I have uploaded videos of those speeches and included them here. They’re worth a watch.